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Microsoft Teams may have only been around for two years, but the group-chat platform is already larger than one of its main competitors. Microsoft announced that Teams has more than 13 million daily active users. The amount rises to 19 million when looking at weekly active users. That means the service is now officially bigger than Slack, an independent platform for online chatting and collaboration.

This is the most specific Microsoft has gotten yet with information about its group-chatting platform. The only other update the company gave was back in March, when it revealed that 500,000 organizations were using the service.

In addition to the audience news, Microsoft shared some upcoming features for Teams. Today, it is rolling out what it's calling "announcements," which allows important news to be highlighted in a channel. Later this month, it plans to roll out channel moderation and priority notifications, which will ping a recipient every two minutes until a response is made. Finally, cross-channel posting will be coming "soon."

Further Reading

Microsoft introduced Teams to users on Office 365 subscriptions in March 2017 and then added a free version in July 2018. The service has been pitched as a replacement for Slack ever since launch. Catching up so quickly in audience size over two years when Slack has been around since August 2013 is a feather in Microsoft’s cap and may be a reason why it has opted to wait so long to announce any numbers about Teams.

Despite the obvious comparisons, Microsoft and Slack have plenty of instances where they aren't targeting the same audiences. Microsoft has an established reputation among enterprise businesses, and being a part of the Office 365 suite makes it a preferred choice for groups that are already working in that ecosystem. For smaller organizations, or even large ones that rely more on Google systems, Slack remains an alternative.

164 Reader Comments

I don't know who configured Skype at work but it doesn't save anything, ever. Which is bad if you actually want to refer back to that one in 10,000 message that held any value but that person was a genius and I want to hug them.

Most likely due to a company retention policy which required them to disable conversation history.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the upcoming features in Teams are already available in Discord. We use discord at work because it's robust, free, and already has moderation. Is there a reason Discord isn't mentioned as an alternative to Teams/Slack? What am I missing?

As far as I understand it Discord has no meaningful governance features and of course no enterprise integration with either O365 or GSuite. For reasonably sized businesses this makes it a non-starter.

Personally I find the slack UI hugely confusing and difficult, particularly when there is a large number of channels/groups you are supposed to be enrolled in as is the case in the large tech company I work for.

Finding unread messages, etc is not trivial.

No kidding - I wish they'd add better organization options, at least the ability to group channels or something.

Instead we get stuff like making channels with a partially typed message disappear from the normal channel list in favor of a "drafts" section no one asked for that can't be turned off. Instead of just using an icon like literally every other chat app.

I mean, at $12.50/user/month, Slack does get pretty pricey if you need SAML integration or the ability to export messages.

For the same price, Microsoft provides all of Office 365 (Business Premium) with more storage, reporting capabilities, and the ability to choose where to store your data.

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Slack also has competition coming from Google's side, with GSuite bundling the new Hangouts Chats. With most companies choosing Office 365 or GSuite and both bundling a chat/collaboration tool, I think Slack will have a hard time growing in the future.

I know my current employer, currently using GSuite + Slack, is planning to move to Chats once it's capable enough.

Yeah ok, but what is the number of users who elected to use teams, instead of corporate overlords deciding that everyone MUST use it?

We started with Slack and then the edict came down that we were switching to Teams. Team's is almost a generation behind in terms of UX. The video chats are pretty good, but we still have big issues with Teams on older versions of windbloz. My team is Mac only and we use Slack for real collaboration and Teams for meetings. Teams is a toy app compared to Slack.

Yeah ok, but what is the number of users who elected to use teams, instead of corporate overlords deciding that everyone MUST use it?

We started with Slack and then the edict came down that we were switching to Teams. Team's is almost a generation behind in terms of UX. The video chats are pretty good, but we still have big issues with Teams on older versions of windbloz. My team is Mac only and we use Slack for real collaboration and Teams for meetings. Teams is a toy app compared to Slack.

There must be some advanced features of Slack that I never used, because I personally find Teams a better business tool than Slack.

Personally I find the slack UI hugely confusing and difficult, particularly when there is a large number of channels/groups you are supposed to be enrolled in as is the case in the large tech company I work for.

Finding unread messages, etc is not trivial.

If you receive significantly more messages than you send, slack just turns into another email client. At least that's my experience.

The most important feature for me would be multiple teams at one, like Discord. It's the only feature I miss once you get over the learning curve of threaded replies.

Learning curve is an understatement. On the Windows app, I still find myself repeatedly replying to the team instead of the thread. For some reason the web app and mobile app are much easier to type in the correct place.

I really wonder how that design made it through testing. This happens to so many people in my company, this must have been a known issue.

I think the problem is the low-contrast style of the UI. The three shades used for background, borders and text boxes are nearly identical, with very little difference in brightness. Add some sunlight on the screen, and the only way to recognize the structure of the layout is the line spacing and indentation.

Their track record is poor in that area, they target enterprise business plebs and generally lean into cost competitiveness to justify poorly wrought features and fluctuating SLA. I'd rather pay more for slack than be tied into Microsoft's online ecosystem.

The most important feature for me would be multiple teams at one, like Discord. It's the only feature I miss once you get over the learning curve of threaded replies.

Learning curve is an understatement. On the Windows app, I still find myself repeatedly replying to the team instead of the thread. For some reason the web app and mobile app are much easier to type in the correct place.

I really wonder how that design made it through testing. This happens to so many people in my company, this must have been a known issue.

I think the problem is the low-contrast style of the UI. The three shades used for background, borders and text boxes are nearly identical, with very little difference in brightness. Add some sunlight on the screen, and the only way to recognize the structure of the layout is the line spacing and indentation.

Jugaad, mostly. Or rather, Microsoft's tendency to throw the cheapest possible resource at a problem in search of a solution. Remember, "I" am agile, but "we" are legion.

Lol unless there is some network effect or advertising audience, active users is a meaningless metric. As far as I know there is almost no barrier to join someone else’s slack or team (basically a collect call, where the org owner side pays the fee), and based on my experience it’s common for someone to be on multiple platforms. As a business metric slack monetizes by active user per org, whereas I’m not sure what this impacts in the office 365 bundle rev. The only meaningful value this metric could give is as a proxy that people prefer teams over slack, but as has been mentioned here with “forced logins” as part of a suite, this could range from distasteful to dishonest. Sounds like a lot of Pr with no impact on revenue.

Yeah ok, but what is the number of users who elected to use teams, instead of corporate overlords deciding that everyone MUST use it?

We started with Slack and then the edict came down that we were switching to Teams. Team's is almost a generation behind in terms of UX. The video chats are pretty good, but we still have big issues with Teams on older versions of windbloz. My team is Mac only and we use Slack for real collaboration and Teams for meetings. Teams is a toy app compared to Slack.

There must be some advanced features of Slack that I never used, because I personally find Teams a better business tool than Slack.

That's the real point honestly, slack was a tool for development teams originally. Then business people came in and decided it should be for them, and began lamenting the lack of integration with software that is useless to the original target audience. The real downside to this whole situation is orgs may shift wholesale to teams and then devs will once again be without a decent collaboration tool so that business users can have PowerPoint integration.

My biggest problem with Teams is just how heavy it is. I have to have it running all the time on my laptop, and across 4 separate processes over 300MB of ram is used up. Then occasionally it starts using up CPU for on obvious reason, which then gets the fans running. And they're loud.

Can't say much about the fans running, but Slack currently is eating up 1 GB of RAM on my MacBook as we're speaking. So I'd take 300 MB as a win, although I'm sure they can make do with lower than that.

Can't say much about the fans running, but Slack currently is eating up 1 GB of RAM on my MacBook as we're speaking. So I'd take 300 MB as a win, although I'm sure they can make do with lower than that.

Both Slack and Teams are Electron apps on desktop and it is in their nature to eat all RAM you have. So both are equally bad in that sense.

Without formal processes laid out by a business to work and collaborate solely in Teams and Slack, I don't see what else they can add that's actually useful. Maybe I'm just old, and just want a simple IM client without all the extra garbage.

As another old guy, I don't get the hubbub about Slack. It's IRC, except in a web browser, and with cloud storage. It hasn't added anything to my daily workflow, and I actively avoid it because it's just a distraction. I imagine Teams is similar. "Newer" does not mean "better". Like you, I'll stick with email and IM.

The use case for these is more to obsolete intranet sites and places where chat but a record is needed would be most useful.

Without formal processes laid out by a business to work and collaborate solely in Teams and Slack, I don't see what else they can add that's actually useful. Maybe I'm just old, and just want a simple IM client without all the extra garbage.

As another old guy, I don't get the hubbub about Slack. It's IRC, except in a web browser, and with cloud storage. It hasn't added anything to my daily workflow, and I actively avoid it because it's just a distraction. I imagine Teams is similar. "Newer" does not mean "better". Like you, I'll stick with email and IM.

Teams is not just a chat client, and you're doing yourself a disservice by acting like "old guy who wants to stick in the past" is the way to treat new products.

My group started beta testing Teams over a year ago and just finished a 500 person rollout a month or two ago. We replaced a chat client that was hated by 95% of the company, and the vast majority of them love Teams.

The integrations alone are huge, not to mention the collaboration options, voice and video calls, meeting management, live events, etc.

You say you'll stick with email, but MS is actively trying to replace email with Teams, and at least in my company, it's cutting down on email activity quite a bit. I can start a group conversation with stakeholders, drop related files in the chart, start a tab with a PowerBI page, drop a Planner page in there, whatever is needed. Now do all that with email.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the upcoming features in Teams are already available in Discord. We use discord at work because it's robust, free, and already has moderation. Is there a reason Discord isn't mentioned as an alternative to Teams/Slack? What am I missing?

How about a basic check to verify that the assholes who sign up to use Discord actually own the email address that they claim?

This bullshit with Discord was so egregious that I don't trust Discord at all. Especially not when Discord staff was saying that "it was possible for someone to mistype their email". How does a Gmail account that features my screen name end up getting booked on a Russian asshole's Discord account?

Fuck Discord.

Spoiler: show

I saw these emails in my inbox, went straight to Discord without clicking the "verify email" link, and was able to log into the Discord account associated with that email and found that the asshole had set up a Discord server for his Russian "friends". I immediately proceeded to dismantle his channels and deleted his Discord server. Then I hunted down the customer service email address to demand that they delete the associated Discord account because it was misusing MY Gmail address. This was about 6 months before Discord finally implemented the "DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT" feature.

TL;DR - DISCORD IS NOT SECURE AT ALL.

Instagram and Facebook are also guilty of this "let people register and immediately use the service without verifying the fucking email address they registered with" problem.

In Facebook's case, it is absolute bullshit that the only way to force Facebook to disassociate my Gmail address from some French asshole's account was to register for a Facebook account and THEN go to their support page.

Fuck these fucking social media services that don't bother to validate their users' email addresses before allowing access.

Personally I find the slack UI hugely confusing and difficult, particularly when there is a large number of channels/groups you are supposed to be enrolled in as is the case in the large tech company I work for.

Finding unread messages, etc is not trivial.

I agree. I hated using slack at my last place of work. It was a horrible mess. Teams is clean and easy.

Teams installs whether you want it or not if you have an enterprise office 365 subscription. There is no easy way to remove it- search online. In order to "turn it off" you must sign in with an account hence a user account is created. If you try to remove it, it will re-install on next startup and on all users on a given computer. Computer boot times are now longer as it attempt to re-install itself and consumes additional resources. This was foisted upon enterprise office 365 users which is how they got their #s so high.

Go to config.office.com and create the xml file that does not include Teams. Use that file to deploy Office. Easy, peasy.

That would require reading and learning or talking with the O365 admins. It's much easier to trash a product before looking to see if what you want out of it has been implemented.

Without formal processes laid out by a business to work and collaborate solely in Teams and Slack, I don't see what else they can add that's actually useful. Maybe I'm just old, and just want a simple IM client without all the extra garbage.

As another old guy, I don't get the hubbub about Slack. It's IRC, except in a web browser, and with cloud storage. It hasn't added anything to my daily workflow, and I actively avoid it because it's just a distraction. I imagine Teams is similar. "Newer" does not mean "better". Like you, I'll stick with email and IM.

Teams is not just a chat client, and you're doing yourself a disservice by acting like "old guy who wants to stick in the past" is the way to treat new products.

As yet another old guy, I completely agree with you. Slack is so useful I use a free account with my family and my wife/kids took to it immediately. We use it for communication, we have a channel for posting recipes, I post tasks for the kids in another channel - it's brilliant.

At work it's completely replaced a lot of terrible email-based notifications, and we're increasingly using it to actually do chatops (issue commands directly from chat and have results also displayed in context).

I mean, at $12.50/user/month, Slack does get pretty pricey if you need SAML integration or the ability to export messages.

For the same price, Microsoft provides all of Office 365 (Business Premium) with more storage, reporting capabilities, and the ability to choose where to store your data.

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Slack also has competition coming from Google's side, with GSuite bundling the new Hangouts Chats. With most companies choosing Office 365 or GSuite and both bundling a chat/collaboration tool, I think Slack will have a hard time growing in the future.

I know my current employer, currently using GSuite + Slack, is planning to move to Chats once it's capable enough.

Google has to respond but then you have to trust them not to kill it. Office 365 is innovating like crazy. Today's 0365 is very much different than 18 months ago and it is easy to see where the 0365 service will outstrip any combination of locally installed Microsoft software in say 12 to 18 months. ( for those standalone office/sharepoint installations out there. ) I honestly do not know if GSuite compares nor do I know if Chats will compete with Slack and Teams but Google needs to respond and make GSuite as important as search if they are going to keep up with Microsoft. For $12.50 a month, O365 currently has a lot to offer to businesses.

I'm curious to know how they determine an "active" users. Everyone at my company has a Teams account as it's bundled into our O365 subscription. Approximately zero people use it (we all have slack as well).

Without formal processes laid out by a business to work and collaborate solely in Teams and Slack, I don't see what else they can add that's actually useful. Maybe I'm just old, and just want a simple IM client without all the extra garbage.

Well there is the benefit of MS seeing all your internal communication which is a great thing if you are a company outside of US so that you can be assured of that leaking to your US competition courtesy of NSLs (after all economy is also national security).

Hopefully someone will go after those with GDPR so we can stop pretending that it is anything other than spyware, just like win10 and office 365

Not sure where you get this from but O365 is GDPR (oops typo in original message) compliant, HIPAA compliant and compliant with many other privacy regulations. And in the case of HIPAA, Microsoft puts their money where their mouth is an indemnifies the customer from breaches and security incidents relating to patient data. But, by all means, continue believing your conspiracy theory. I'm sure there are law enforcement hooks for fraud, crimes and what not, but Nadella isn't sitting in his office every night with Pinky wondering what he's going to do today.

Without formal processes laid out by a business to work and collaborate solely in Teams and Slack, I don't see what else they can add that's actually useful. Maybe I'm just old, and just want a simple IM client without all the extra garbage.

Well there is the benefit of MS seeing all your internal communication which is a great thing if you are a company outside of US so that you can be assured of that leaking to your US competition courtesy of NSLs (after all economy is also national security).

Hopefully someone will go after those with GDPR so we can stop pretending that it is anything other than spyware, just like win10 and office 365

Not sure where you get this from but O365 is GDPF compliant, HIPAA compliant and compliant with many other privacy regulations. And in the case of HIPAA, Microsoft puts their money where their mouth is an indemnifies the customer from breaches and security incidents relating to patient data. But, by all means, continue believing your conspiracy theory. I'm sure there are law enforcement hooks for fraud, crimes and what not, but Nadella isn't sitting in his office every night with Pinky wondering what he's going to do today.

If the data ends up in US then it is not GDPR compliant. Sure you can hide behind Privacy Shield but the second that piece of shit gets in front of CJEU it will be struck down just as Safe Harbour was before it. Using any cloud service run by a US company or with servers in US is automatically against GDPR as we know that NSA and co have free access to it all.

The only version of O365 that might be GDPR compliant is the one that is run by a local company with a licence from MS but no other input by MS. That is MS has nothing to do with it nor any control over it.

I'm curious to know how they determine an "active" users. Everyone at my company has a Teams account as it's bundled into our O365 subscription. Approximately zero people use it (we all have slack as well).

Office 365 provides robust metrics on logins of an O365 account to any of its given services. I'm sure Microsoft has an aggregate report somewhere on the back end.

It might be bigger, but it definitely isn't better. And after attempting to use Skype for Business I can understand why anyone forced to use that is running even to teams if not to an outside solution.

Without formal processes laid out by a business to work and collaborate solely in Teams and Slack, I don't see what else they can add that's actually useful. Maybe I'm just old, and just want a simple IM client without all the extra garbage.

Well there is the benefit of MS seeing all your internal communication which is a great thing if you are a company outside of US so that you can be assured of that leaking to your US competition courtesy of NSLs (after all economy is also national security).

Hopefully someone will go after those with GDPR so we can stop pretending that it is anything other than spyware, just like win10 and office 365

Not sure where you get this from but O365 is GDPF compliant, HIPAA compliant and compliant with many other privacy regulations. And in the case of HIPAA, Microsoft puts their money where their mouth is an indemnifies the customer from breaches and security incidents relating to patient data. But, by all means, continue believing your conspiracy theory. I'm sure there are law enforcement hooks for fraud, crimes and what not, but Nadella isn't sitting in his office every night with Pinky wondering what he's going to do today.

If the data ends up in US then it is not GDPR compliant. Sure you can hide behind Privacy Shield but the second that piece of shit gets in front of CJEU it will be struck down just as Safe Harbour was before it. Using any cloud service run by a US company or with servers in US is automatically against GDPR as we know that NSA and co have free access to it all.

The only version of O365 that might be GDPR compliant is the one that is run by a local company with a licence from MS but no other input by MS. That is MS has nothing to do with it nor any control over it.

You're going to need to support that with links to rulings in the EU because if true, no US company can do business in the EU and I find that hard to believe. You do realize that Microsoft runs all of these services on the Azure cloud and that Azure has physical servers in dozens of countries around the world correct? It is entirely possible to run a GDPR compliant service outside of the jurisdiction of the US though I am sure that the EU law enforcement has their hands in the back end just as the US law enforcement does. It wouldn't make sense to block law enforcement from access data on request and probably illegal in many countries, not just the US.

Without formal processes laid out by a business to work and collaborate solely in Teams and Slack, I don't see what else they can add that's actually useful. Maybe I'm just old, and just want a simple IM client without all the extra garbage.

Well there is the benefit of MS seeing all your internal communication which is a great thing if you are a company outside of US so that you can be assured of that leaking to your US competition courtesy of NSLs (after all economy is also national security).

Hopefully someone will go after those with GDPR so we can stop pretending that it is anything other than spyware, just like win10 and office 365

Not sure where you get this from but O365 is GDPF compliant, HIPAA compliant and compliant with many other privacy regulations. And in the case of HIPAA, Microsoft puts their money where their mouth is an indemnifies the customer from breaches and security incidents relating to patient data. But, by all means, continue believing your conspiracy theory. I'm sure there are law enforcement hooks for fraud, crimes and what not, but Nadella isn't sitting in his office every night with Pinky wondering what he's going to do today.

If the data ends up in US then it is not GDPR compliant. Sure you can hide behind Privacy Shield but the second that piece of shit gets in front of CJEU it will be struck down just as Safe Harbour was before it. Using any cloud service run by a US company or with servers in US is automatically against GDPR as we know that NSA and co have free access to it all.

The only version of O365 that might be GDPR compliant is the one that is run by a local company with a licence from MS but no other input by MS. That is MS has nothing to do with it nor any control over it.

You're going to need to support that with links to rulings in the EU because if true, no US company can do business in the EU and I find that hard to believe. You do realize that Microsoft runs all of these services on the Azure cloud and that Azure has physical servers in dozens of countries around the world correct? It is entirely possible to run a GDPR compliant service outside of the jurisdiction of the US though I am sure that the EU law enforcement has their hands in the back end just as the US law enforcement does. It wouldn't make sense to block law enforcement from access data on request and probably illegal in many countries, not just the US.

Exact same is valid for Privacy shield as there is still allowance for US to use national security excuse to spy on all our data. That means that the agreement is not worth the paper it was signed on even if we ignore US love of ignoring international agreements.

All of your links are MS. It would be quite surprising to hear MS claim that its products are breaking GDPR. You get a very different opinions from data protection agencies in EU. Win10 is already getting a lot of shit from them and that's enterprise version. Home and pro are in no way or form compliant with GDPR. Sadly most of that has to go through Irish data protection agency and they are either swamped or, possibly, under influence by Irish politicians who have been caught several times applying very different rules to large multinationals.

Let's also remember that MS was the only willing collaborator in the PRISM program and exceptionally fast in converting Skype from something that police cry about to a massive spying tool.

I've mostly heard that Teams is "ok" from people who have used it. I'll take anything over Lync/S4B though, that truly is a gigantic piece of shit. In fact I'd take a boot sector virus over S4B. Heck, I'd take a real actual virus over S4B, and not just one of the wimpy ones either.

Microsoft made a really smart move including Teams for free with Office 365 subscriptions. A lot of places already use the office suite, outlook, active directory. Teams just complements that, and by being free with the subscription, a no-brainer for many orgs -- and since its 'free', to the bean-counters making purchasing decisions, it's a lot more attractive than Slack.

Of course. This is straight out of the Microsoft Marketing Strategy 101, rule #1:

I've actually been working on testing out teams at our workplace, built the server, all of us in engineering have started using it and we all unanimously agree that our existing Webex collaboration utility is better. Course we also think the webex collaboration utility is a steaming pile so take that for what you will. But yeah,. Teams is pretty horrendous.

We actually had our MS rep in last month talking about it, we also told them we preferred Webex better and our opinion of webex. The following discussion then occurred:

I’m just curious which server y’all built. Teams is cloud only and doesn’t support an on-site server (that I’m aware of - and I could be wrong so please don’t think I’m trying to call you out. Just wondering about the implementation).

Oh I didn’t think you were, on the install side O was confusing it with the Azure Connect server that I had built at the same time I was working on implementing it. It has been several months since doing both and they got blended together in all of the projects in my memory. Thanks for pointing that out. Still sucks though as a product.

Microsoft made a really smart move including Teams for free with Office 365 subscriptions. A lot of places already use the office suite, outlook, active directory. Teams just complements that, and by being free with the subscription, a no-brainer for many orgs -- and since its 'free', to the bean-counters making purchasing decisions, it's a lot more attractive than Slack.

I find that strategy similar to how Adobe surpassed the QuarkXPress user base in the print design space.

At the time, Adobe had a good reputation with Photoshop and Illustrator, but not with PageMaker. So, instead of a bottom-up revamp of PageMaker, created a new app with InDesign. Early versions weren't ready for prime time, but were bundled with Creative Suite, so, essentially free.

Regular iteration, combined with Quark's arrogance—and resulting stagnation—as the (then) market leader, led to InDesign's takeover of that market.

I use both Teams and Slack. Both have their advantages and limitations.